Petition of grievances

Concerned that someone out there is trying to use petitions to put forward a ballot proposal, candidate, or recall effort that you don’t like? The answer, it seems, is simple: just hire up all the petition collectors.

Most folks don’t realize that most petition collectors are hired professionals, whose job is to find good spots, get folks to sign, and make sure the signatures are valid (complete, legible, from the right county, etc.). This is occasionally highlighted by opponents of a given petition (“They’re not a grass roots campaign — they’re hiring professional petition gatherers to do all this work!” — as if the signatures themselves are somehow thus invalidated), but pretty much everyone does it. It’s too difficult to organize volunteers on a widespread basis, let alone the problems with petitions that poor management of them can produce.

But there’s not an endless supply of petition gatherers out there. Which means that in some cases, opponents have attempted to derail petitions by hiring out of that limited pool to circulate (sometimes meaningless) counter-petitions.

Attempting to ‘buy up’ the signature-gathering labor pool in order to prevent a measure from reaching the ballot has been a strategy used in local elections as well. The city of Los Angeles witnessed an initiative battle between a coalition of environmentalists and Occidental Petroleum Corporation over oil drilling on the coast of Pacific Palisades. A proposal by environmentalists to ban any oil drilling (Proposition O) on the coast was countered by an oil industry proposal to allow drilling but with certain restrictions and safeguards (Proposition P). Occidental Petroleum enlisted the signature-gathering services of both Kimball Petition Management and American Petition Consultants with the clear understanding that neither firm would assist the qualification efforts of the anti-oil drilling initiative. Unable to engineer a sufficient paid circulation drive, proponents of Proposition O had to resort to the expensive method of direct mail petition circulation — a very uncommon means of signature gathering at the local level.

Interesting.